


Just Another Four Letter Word

by Dawnwind



Category: Starsky and Hutch - Fandom
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-05-07
Updated: 2011-05-07
Packaged: 2017-10-19 03:23:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,624
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/196318
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dawnwind/pseuds/Dawnwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Missing scene from Starsky vs Hutch. What did they talk <br/>about between the bomb blast and meeting at Huggy's?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Just Another Four Letter Word

The same week Ken Hutchinson had infidelity on his sixth grade spelling test, his father provided him with a real life example.

Seeing his father at home and in bed in the middle of the afternoon was unnerving enough. That he was naked and kissing a brunette with a birthmark in the shape of Florida on her butt was too humiliating to be tolerated.

Louise Hutchinson must have thought the same thing, because once Mark Hutchinson was dressed, she told him to go find in a hotel and never come back. The words she used to describe her husband and his mistress were not on Ken's spelling list, but he knew them.

 _Bitch_

 _Bastard_

 _Adulterer_

All three words came to mind twenty-two years later when Starsky slugged him in the stomach. Standing on Kira's front porch, watching the Torino peel away with a squeal of rubber, Hutch realized that he'd become his own father. I-N-F-I-D-E-L-I-T-Y.

He kept flashing back to the five freckles on Kira's butt that looked like the Hawaiian islands, only in reverse order.

Where was his mother at a time like this? Why didn't she shake her finger under his nose, tell him to go find in a hotel, and that he was acting like a dick on legs?

 _Her words, not his._

He struggled to put on his leather jacket and glanced back at Kira's door, but he had absolutely no wish to speak to her again. Which would make things difficult since they were still in the midst of an ongoing investigation and had to work together.

He wanted Starsky. Wanted to sit Starsky down and try to explain his own behavior. Except an explanation would mean that he understood what he had done. Why he had laid Starsky's girlfriend. And that wasn't something he understood at all.

The squawk from the police band radio in his borrowed car brought him out of his reverie and he stuffed his shirt tails into his pants. He had to act like a functioning detective. Had to follow-through with the case, or he'd have nothing solid to hold onto. No partner, no life, nothing.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The blast from the hand grenade left a ringing in Hutch's ears that settled into a throbbing headache an hour later. He went through the motions of securing the crime scene doggedly, ignoring the pain, because—God knows—he deserved some kind of punishment. He and Starsky had worked together as they always did, but there was something separating them, a rift in their partnership. It almost felt like Starsky had shoved a knife in his belly back at Kira's house instead of his fist.

Hutch leaned against one of the faux marble pillars in the Golden Lady Ballroom watching the crime lab crew collect each and every bit of shrapnel from the grenade. Tables and chairs were strewn across the floor, now just so much kindling wood. The wounded had been tended and taken to hospital. Crazy Joey had been cuffed and taken to lock up. Even Kira had left—where Hutch didn't know, and didn't care. He felt isolated, cut off from his usual post-arrest routines. And he still hadn't figured out what—or why—he'd capitulated to Kira's siren song.

Was he really so depraved that he would simply fall into bed with his best friend's girlfriend—the woman Starsky wanted to marry—simply because she kissed him and murmured sex in his ear?

He'd examined the moments leading up to their tumble in the hay half a dozen times and hadn't yet found a single redeeming factor in his behavior.

He'd been a bastard. Kira was the bitch and…

Hutch licked his dry lips, closing his eyes against the pounding in his skull.

 _Adulterer._

Crazy as it sounded—that's how he felt, like an adulterer. And the definition of an adulterer was someone who betrayed the sacred marriage vows.

So when had he married Starsky?

Hutch was so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he nearly jumped a foot when Starsky tapped him on the shoulder. "Fuck!" he ground out, mad at himself for so many reasons, but mostly for not seeing who was right beside him.

'Hey!" Starsky said.

"I can't hear you," Hutch said sourly, pointing to his ear. Sounds echoed and vibrated through his head like a crazed ping-pong ball. It just exacerbated the headache tenfold, and all he wanted to do was sleep off this entire day. Which wouldn't fix a damned thing.

"Paramedics are waiting for you!" Starsky shouted, gesturing at the two guys in blue uniforms hovering in the lobby of the Golden Lady near Madame Bouvet's cashier cage. "You're the last one to get checked out."

"I don't want…"

Starsky looked at him, anger overlaid with something else that hid behind those deep blue eyes. He raised his hands dismissively. "Do whatever the hell you want, that's what you're good at. I'm going back to Metro."

 _Damn._

There was a time when they would never have split up in the middle of a case. They never would have ridden back separately to the station to write out their final reports.

"Wait!" Hutch grabbed Starsky's arm, felt him stiffen and try to pull away just like he'd done at Kira's. "Will you wait for me?" He could see the two paramedics shrug and turn back to their equipment, and he looked directly into Starsky's eyes. It was like getting punched in the gut all over again.

"Hutch." Starsky clenched his jaw and backed away. He stood against the wall, rubbing the back of his neck.

It came to Hutch that Starsky undoubtedly had a headache, too. There was a time when Starsky's welfare would have come even before his own, but lately, he'd been so absorbed in his own turmoil that he'd almost blotted out Starsky completely.

"You all right?" Hutch asked hesitantly, very aware that Starsky no longer tolerated his touch.

Starsky eyed him warily, as if caught between their old partnership and whatever Hutch had wrought that morning. He blew out an exasperated breath. "Let those guys shine a light in your eyes and listen to your chest, I'll wait."

The examination was uneventful but it felt like a lull between storms. Hutch swallowed the aspirin he was given and stood aside as the paramedic truck drove off into the night.

When Starsky came up beside him, Hutch almost patted his partner's belly, as he had on so many other occasions. But he didn't. He didn't touch. He didn't ….

What?

What did he want to do?

Hugging Starsky came to mind. Rubbing his cheek against Starsky's halo of dark curls.

He wanted to gently wipe the streak of plaster dust off Starsky's cheek and trace the shape of his mouth.

Stunned by the images, Hutch took a step backward. Starsky's face hardened and he walked resolutely past his partner to the Torino parked at an angle in the street.

Hutch had brought his loaner car to the Golden Lady, but it was still boxed in by a black and white BCPD cruiser and the crime lab van. He didn't care. Leaving his car there was justified. He had to talk to Starsky, had to make amends or there was absolutely nothing left. He'd blown up their partnership—their friendship-- just as effectively as Joey Webster's grenade had destroyed the ballroom.

"Starsky!" Hutch had long legs, he could out stride Starsky any day of the week, and they made it to the Torino at the same moment. For a split second, he got the impression that Starsky was going to make a break for it and simply run away. Except Starsky would never do that.

Starsky stood his ground, one hand on the roof of the red car.

Hutch had a sudden, all encompassing love for the damned striped Coke can. It was part of Starsky, part of who he was. And Hutch loved Starsky.

It was astonishingly, overwhelmingly simple, and so very complicated.

"We need to talk." Hutch was surprised how ordinary he sounded. How rational, after such a mind-blowing, life-altering revelation.

 _He loved Starsky._

"You think so?" Starsky raised his chin, like the tough street-punk Hutch had thought him to be when they first met. "I don't know what to… believe anymore, Hutch." He spread his arms, exposing himself, open and vulnerable. "You tell me."

For someone who charmed the world with a twinkle in his eye and a swagger in his hip, Starsky was a surprisingly private person. That charismatic facade hid a side of the man very few other than Hutch had ever seen.

Relief shot through Hutch. He was still being allowed in.

Leaning against the driver's side passenger door, Hutch stuck his hands into the pockets of his long black coat. Hours after midnight, it was chilly, even on the first week in May, and tendrils of fog curled around the electrical poles. "I am not going to try and explain my behavior," he started. "Because I can't."

"Going with the old dick on legs excuse?" Starsky asked.

Hutch was jolted to the bottom of his soul. _How did Starsky know?_ He'd never told him about coming home to witness full-on frontal nudity right after getting an A for spelling infidelity correctly.

"'Cause I gotta tell you, Hutch, it's lame," Starsky went on. It was very dark. The nearest streetlight was dim to the point of uselessness. Hutch could just make out the angular cant of Starsky's cheekbone and the froth of black that was his hair. The rest of him was a dark outline of a man. "At first I thought you were just being the same guy who slept with Kathy Marshall one night after I did, and then rammed it into Nancy while she sucked me off."

Starsky's crudity burned in Hutch's gut. He wasn't usually so blatantly cruel.

"Some of those stews used to call you Ken, the Stud."

"What the hell are you going on about?" Hutch lashed out. So he'd tomcatted around, there was no crime in it. Except the word adulterer had never felt so apt before. "You were right there beside me!"

"Yeah," Starsky said simply. He sounded so tired, completely defeated. "We used to do it together, so why in the hell would you do it behind my back?"

"You expected me to…" Hutch faltered, not sure where this was going. "Sleep with Kira?"

"No!" Starsky shouted, fist cocked to slug Hutch again.

And Hutch would have let him, too. He hadn't fought back at Kira's, and he wouldn't here. Because he had been in the wrong. He just couldn’t figure out why he hadn't known that before he'd walked into Kira's bedroom and unbuttoned her shirt.

"You never, ever moved in on a girl that I was already dating," Starsky said. It was as if the words were being dragged up from the bottom of his soul. "Not once. Yeah, we used to compete like there was an Olympics for one-night stands. That was playin' the field. All those stewardesses and disco dollies were playing along, too. We knew the rules." He palmed his forehead like he needed to push something out of his brain.

Hutch didn't move, trying to slow his breathing down. He was panting, as if he'd been running flat out after a suspect instead of leaning against the car listening to his best friend. A part of him that could detach from the guilt of his own actions latched on to what Starsky was saying, because somewhere, in Starsky's angered rambling, there was logic.

"Even Abby." Starsky smacked the roof of the car, making the whole chassis shake. "You scooped her right out from under me with a couple of half-truths and some fancy footwork. I caught on fast enough, but she was your girl." He hunched his shoulders, crossing his arms over his chest. "But we don't share the special ones, Hutch."

 _There it was._

"Helen," Hutch said softly against the pain in his head.

"Terry, Gillian," Starsky recited the litany of their past loves. "Van?"

"No." Van didn't belong in the list because she had been before he and Starsky were together.

He and Starsky had forged a bond far more powerful, more long-lasting, than either of them had with anyone else. No woman had ever truly come between them.

"Until Kira," Starsky said as if he knew exactly what Hutch was thinking.

"What do you want me to say?" _You were one of the special ones, Starsky. The special one._

"That Kira was different."

"Kira was different," Hutch repeated dully. Bastard, bitch and adulterer went through his thoughts again.

"So why?" Starsky glanced away when the crime lab crew walked out of the dance hall toting bags of evidence that they stored in the back of their van.

The men climbed into the van and drove away, their laughing and joking sending shards of pain through Hutch's skull. He squeezed his eyes shut when the overly bright headlights from the police cruiser switched on suddenly. The driver must have been sitting in his car, watching them the whole time. Hutch almost thought he should go over and offer some kind of explanation, but what would he say? That he'd diddled his best friend's girl to prove that he was the better lover? Some other macho excuse?

As if that proved anything.

 _"Adam Six, a 2-11 in progress on the corner of National and Hacienda."_ The disembodied voice from dispatch spilled out of the window as police car passed the Torino.

"Why?" Hutch had enough. He'd screwed up—that should be written on his gravestone. It was quite obvious that now was not the time to tell Starsky that his feelings had changed. There might never be a right time. All he could hope for was a peace treaty between them, a cease fire so that he and Starsky could rekindle their partnership.

It would never be quite the same, but he had only to look in the mirror to see who was the blame for that. Was it possible that he would have never acknowledged his love for Starsky, even to himself, if he hadn't had succumbed to Kira? Did two wrongs ever make a right?

"Why?" Starsky repeated, and there was a hint of some other emotion in his voice. He slumped against the car and rubbed the back of his neck again, ruthlessly pinching the muscles just above his collar. "So what made Kira different?"

"Starsky, you're going in circles." Hutch started over to his car. The old junker he'd signed out of the police lot after his Ford was bombed two weeks earlier looked like every other beater he'd ever owned. Without the cruiser boxing him in, he was free to drive away. Maybe all the way down the coast to Baja to fish for about ten years. Something that didn't require thought…

"I know." Starsky sounded bleak.

Hutch stopped, exhausted. Standing between the two cars, he didn't know whether to just walk away or move back to Starsky. God, he wanted to start the day over again, maybe even the whole week.

"I wanted her to be the one, you know?" Starsky whispered into the dark, quiet street. Hutch had to concentrate past the pounding in his own ears to hear him. "So that I would stop…wanting the whole package."

"Wife, picket fence and two point five kids?" Hutch asked. He'd wanted that, too, back when he was married to Van. Seemed like some one else's lifetime ago. When had he stopped wanting the All American Dream? As far back as when he'd met Starsky? He didn't know any more.

"How can anyone have two point five kids?" Starsky looked so very far away, a disembodied head visible over the roof of the Torino.

He must have gotten out his keys because Hutch could hear jingling when Starsky pried them from his tight jeans.

"I wanted to be in love," Starsky said. "I wanted it to be Kira. I…don't think she was."

"Starsk." He literally didn't know what to say. Should he push Starsky back into Kira's embrace? Or declare his love right there in the street in front of the Golden Lady Ballroom? "You…have to go where your heart leads."

"You start writing for Hallmark's? Get in the damned car!"

"Yours?" Hutch froze in the act of getting out his own keys.

"Yes, mine." Starsky bent and unlocked the door. For a moment, he was hidden by the bulk of the car, and Hutch felt a rush of irrational dread. "What'd you think? I was gonna let you drive that hunk a junk?" Starsky rambled on. "Thing'll get you killed, it's rusted through…"

Just opening the passenger door of the Torino, a simple action he'd done hundreds of times before, loosened the band of pain around Hutch's head. He eased into the seat with a sigh of almost contentment.

"We can get that thing towed over to Merle's so he can…" Starsky had been talking very fast. He stopped so abruptly that Hutch gulped air. "Was Kira different, Hutch?" Starsky asked, pain shot through every word.

"You loved her, buddy."

"I wanted to love her." Starsky shrugged, flexing his fingers around the steering wheel like he was going to strangle someone. "It takes two to tango."

"Starsky…"

"What I mean is, you weren't the only one in that bed." Starsky turned the key, the engine almost drowning out his words. The car shot down the street, going from zero to fifty in seconds.

"I should have…"

"Don't." Starsky took a turn fast, the g-force throwing Hutch against the passenger window. "Don't apologize. Don't…" He was gripping the steering wheel so hard that his knuckles had blanched out. His skin shone pale as alabaster in the flash of the streetlights as the car sped through the dark. "Don't. Both of you were wrong." Starsky started to say something else but stopped, cutting his right hand through the air between them. "If she loved me, she would have stopped it."

"I love you, and I didn't."

The Torino swerved wide when Starsky went up the onramp to the 405, almost clipping a freeway sign. "Why the hell do you say something like that when I'm driving?" Starsky shouted, baring his teeth. "Fuck, Hutch!"

It seemed prudent not to say anything more. His heart hammering against his breastbone so hard that it hurt, Hutch snuck a look at the speedometer. The needle was quivering just under the 80 mark. Luckily, there were very few cars on the freeway this late at night.

 _He shouldn't have let the truth out._ Hadn't planned on it—but the hellish word— _Love_ — that greeting card staple and romantic, hearts-and-flowers sentiment had slipped out.

The heavy car barreled down the black highway, miles zipping past like unwanted girlfriends. When was the last time Hutch had really even wanted a girl—strike that, a woman, badly enough to pursue her? When was the last time he'd looked for love instead of simply using sex to drown out all the negativity in his life?

Starsky was the one constant, the one bright light that cured what ailed him, and he'd nearly let Starsky slip away.

"I can't believe you said that!" Starsky erupted again after almost five minutes of silent driving. "First you fuck Kira and then fuck with me, is that it?"

"If you think that's how it is, then you didn't even know me at all." Hutch leaned his head back on the head rest, feeling like he was hurtling through a vast unknown with only one single compass to guide him home, and that was Starsky. "It's long past time I told you the truth."

"You love me."

"Yes."

"Hell of a way to show it, taking my girl."

Starsky cranked the steering wheel sharply to the right, the car bouncing over the off-ramp so abruptly that Hutch felt the jolt all the way up his spine. The Torino fishtailed on the flatter city street, brakes squealing when Starsky shoved the pedal down to the floorboards. "So tell me now," he said into the quiet when he shut off the motor. "Tell me you love me."

The agony in his voice nearly sliced Hutch in half. The last thing he wanted was to cause more pain. If this was the last time he ever said the words aloud, so be it. "I love you."

"We're both a couple of assholes without a brain between us." Starsky put out his hand, tentatively brushing something off Hutch's cheek. His finger strayed downward, finally tracing the curve of Hutch's mustache. "I'm never gonna get those two point five kids, am I?"

"Not outta me, you're not," Hutch whispered. Hope, love, all those four letter words, were crowding his brain, wanting a voice, shouting for joy. Infidelity and adulterer were banished forever.

"God, I love you, Hutch." Starsky said, starting to laugh, and maybe cry, at the same time. Hutch pretended he didn't see the stray tears in his partner's bright eyes. "Now what're we gonna do about it?"

"I can tell you one thing." Hutch leaned in and got his first kiss. The first kiss that really mattered in his entire life, because it was from Starsky. "We are not sharing Kira."

"You better barkin' believe that," Starsky said as solemnly as he could while laughing and kissing Hutch over and over again. "No threesomes, ever. Just you and me, riding off into the sunset."

"You gonna tell her, or should I?" Hutch asked, hands around Starsky's neck, adoring his mouth.

"Nah, both of us together." Starsky smiled against Hutch's lips. "Could be fun."

 

FIN


End file.
